Abstract: A central aspect of the relation between biosemiotics and
biology is investigated by asking: Is a biological concept of function
intrinsically related to a biosemiotic concept of sign action, and vice versa?
A biological notion of function (as some process or part that serves some
purpose in the context of maintenance and reproduction of the whole organism)
is discussed in the light of the attempt to provide an understanding of life
processes as being of a semiotic nature, i.e., constituted by sign actions.
Does signification and communication in biology (e.g., intracellular
communication) always presuppose an organism with distinct semiotic or
quasi-semiotic functions? And, symmetrically, is it the case that functional
relations are simply not conceivable without living sign action? The present
note is just an introduction to a project aiming at elucidating the relations
between biofunction and biosemiosis.

Biology has celebrated some major triumphs in the period beginning with
Darwin's publication of Origin of Species in 1859 all the way up to
2001, when newspaper headlines proclaimed that the human genome had now been
charted. Now that biology has shown us what life is (from a scientific
standpoint), what shall we do with biosemiotics?

The biosemiotic project involves looking from a completely different angle at
natural biological processes of which, to be sure, we have already gained
knowledge about through the traditional science of biology and the research
fields it includes (molecular biology, cellular biology, ethology, ecology,
neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, etc.). From these disciplines, we have now
gained an enormous amount of knowledge of living organisms. At the same time,
however, there are gaping holes in this knowledge. It has a dual nature, i.e.
on the one hand it comprises a large body of positive facts and theoretical
generalizations, even coherent and well-confirmed theories (such as cellular
theory and evolutionary theory), but on the other hand it takes the form of
non-knowledge. The latter applies, in particular, to the knowledge we
have gained of humans as a species by mapping the human genome. This
non-knowledge exists at least at two levels.

First of all, there is non-knowledge in the form of holes or white blots on
the previously existing theoretical map of biological fields that may be filled
in, possibly in the near future. The hope is that more research funds and
research hours will be able to fill these holes. Obviously, for example, now
that we have the complete human genome[1] we
would also like to map out the complete chimpanzee genome, since the chimpanzee
is our nearest biological relative and we hope to gain a better understanding
of that kinship. All we need to do is begin the task of DNA sequencing a
chimpanzee -- a major undertaking, to be sure, but one that is fully feasible.
In this way, we can continue doing the same with other species. Even today, we
have detailed genetic maps of biologists' favorite model organisms (the fruit
fly, a nematode worm, the coli bacteria, the yeast cell, and even, in part, the
mouse).

Secondly, our biological non-knowledge exists at a level on which we are
approaching the limits of what we can expect to know if we simply use existing
methods with no breakdown in our theories, i.e. if we simply continue placing
more small pieces into the existing puzzle. With regard to certain questions,
if non-knowledge at this level were transformed into knowledge, we would
probably need to look at them through different theoretical glasses or use a
different paradigm, in the precise sense Thomas Kuhn uses this word. Here, a
paradigm is not just another theory that may assign a slightly different
meaning to the concepts that were previously used, but almost another world, at
least for the researcher, i.e., a different set of theoretical tasks, some
different values used to determine what constitutes good questions and even for
which things a person, as a scientist, can research in the first place. It is
on this latter level, in particular, that biosemiotics tackles the problem,
using the following fundamental assertion: The traditional paradigm in biology
-- which encompasses a number of experimental methods, normal scientific
working procedures, neo-Darwinism and its mathematical population models, etc.
-- alone is not and cannot be sufficient to answer the following key
question:[2]How did meaning originate in
biological systems? And what is it (if not meaning, i.e. the creation of signs,
and semiotic processes in general) that makes biology something special,
something that on certain points fundamentally differs from the types of
systems studied, for example, by physicists and chemists?

Here we shall undertake a thorough examination of the idea of the biological
creation of meaning as something central to all living things by taking a
closer look at the way in which people normally answer the riddle of what it is
about organisms that is special, i.e., we will look at the answer provided by
"mainstream" biologists or conventional anti-reductionist biologists such as
Ernst Mayr (who did not like to see his field, evolutionary biology, reduced to
chemistry as applied to biology) and compare it to the answer given by leading
biosemioticians, in the tradition from Jakob and Thure von Uexküll and
Thomas A. Sebeok up to biosemioticians such as Jesper Hoffmeyer and Kalevi
Kull. Let us reveal right away that traditional biological understanding[3] mentions two crucial characteristics of living
systems that make them radically different and irreducible to physics and
chemistry:

(1) biosystems (organisms) contain genetic information;

(2) biosystems (organisms) have functions.

The former, of course, is a cryptosemiotic concept, for even here biologists
admit indirectly that it is necessary to use semiotic concepts to describe
biological systems. It is just that biologists do not attribute any particular
significance to this: after all, they typically say, "genetic information" is
just a metaphor for certain molecular processes that are organized in a certain
way. Here the biosemiotician steps in and interprets the occurrence of such
metaphors more realistically, namely as a sign that when one apparently cannot
understand a key biological process, such as the hereditary transfer of traits
between generations, without having to use informational metaphors, it is
probably because the processes themselves, for which the metaphors are
meaningfully used, actually have the nature of semiotic processes -- sign
production, sign transfer, and sign interpretation.[4]

As we know, the second point -- that organisms have functions -- is
particularly well known in biology. No biologist can get by without directly or
indirectly referring to the (functional) role some part or another of the
organism plays in the whole organism.[5] On the
other hand, many philosophers and some theoretical biologists, such as John
Maynard Smith, have speculated that this all-pervasive interest in functions is
what makes biology different from the science that deals with inorganic nature,
such as those branches of basic physics that only study physical processes.

But do we not run into the concept of function here, too, one might ask?
Certainly it is not complete nonsense to ask what function solar wind has for
the earth's atmosphere? The standard response here is that the question is
understandable, to be sure, in so far as it can be reworded into a question of
the causal role a phenomenon such as solar wind can conceivably have on earth's
atmosphere as a physical system, but to the extent that it can be answered as
such -- purely physically causal -- there are nonetheless some significant
differences between the limited role the concept of function can play in a
subject such as geophysics or astrophysics and the key role it plays in
biology. Of course, the difference is so great it is really just a matter of
using the same term for two different concepts. In physics the assertion or
question of function (such as the one mentioned above) can be rewritten without
loss of meaning to the purely causal[6] question
of direct cause-and-effect contexts in the traditional classical mechanical
sense, in which a cause precedes an effect in time, but both cause and effect
exist on the same ontological level, i.e., they are of the same nature, as in
the example of the relationship between the sun and the earth's climate. This
is a matter of material physical processes on the macroscale. As shown by the
past 30 years of discussions on the concept of function in the philosophy of
biology[7] it is far more complex to state the
connection between causality and functionality in biology.

Essentially, the reason for this difficulty is that in biological systems
there is an inner connection between the informational (which, without
hesitation, we will call here the semiotic aspect of a living system) and the
functional aspect. This is a connection that has been largely overlooked in the
past and we will examine it in greater detail now.

Traditional biologists know quite well, implicitly at least, that there is a
connection between the functional and the informational aspect: No organism
exists that does not consist of a whole of its parts, whereby the
parts enter into functional relations with one another and with the
whole. Even in the simplest conceivable organism, such as a simple, free-living
cell, this is dependent on the cell's organizing its parts, not exclusively but
in part with the help of a genetic memory (a semiotic code), which makes sure
the (functionally) "correct" parts are produced in the cell's autocatalytic
network of processes. In this case, it is primarily protein synthesis, whereby
without the genetic memory a mere jumble of "dysfunctional" proteins that are
useless to the cell would be produced.

As we know, from a chemical standpoint proteins are a rather normal kind of
large molecule (polymers characterized by peptide bonds, which combine the
individual building blocks, amino acids, into long chains). It is one thing, as
a chemist, to use chemical theory and experimentation to identify a molecule as
a protein, and not a sugar, a lipid, a nucleic acid, or something else. But it
is something quite different, as a biologist, to characterize a particular
protein as an enzyme, or a neuropeptide, or a hormone, or a histone (which is a
class of proteins involved, among other things, in the packing of
chromosomes).[8] If it is found that a protein
is a histone or an enzyme, for example, then this is also, in part, a
functional description of the protein. It says something about the relationship
between part (protein) and whole (the cell as an organism). This is rather
banal, as far as it goes, and on the concrete level of molecular biology it is
nothing new, but the semiotic and biotheoretical implications of this fact are
far-reaching:

As we shall now show, this means that function and sign, both
seen biosemiotically as phenomena that describe living organisms, are directly
related to each other, even in the narrow sense, i.e. both ontologically and
epistemologically, or in other words: both as (ontological) properties of
nature and (epistemologically) as conditions for our knowledge of nature.

Ontologically, sign and function are related like the chicken and the egg: It
is a bit absurd to ask which came first, the sign in nature or functions in
nature: biosemiotically, both arise simultaneously in the same lengthy
historical process, with the creation of the first organisms, which of
course have cellular structures, here on earth at least. Of course, a stolid
biologist could choose to interpret the chicken/egg duality in the light of the
biological difference between a single-celled and a multicelled organism. In
this case, the question of the chicken and the egg is not quite so absurd: In
this case, from the phylogenetic perspective, it is namely the egg that "came
first", since we must assume that multicelled organisms ("individuals") are a
(not uncomplicated) product of a long evolutionary process (cf. Buss 1987). But
the evolutionary sequence of single-celled and multicelled organisms is not the
point here at all. The point is, 1): that in our basic understanding of what
living beings are, we must operate with a concept of the organism that
presupposes that the organism is both a semiotic phenomenon -- a system
of sign processes -- and a functional phenomenon -- a whole made of
parts, where the parts have functions relative to one another and relative to
the maintenance of the whole, and 2): that these two aspects, the
mereological[9] and the semiotic, are closely
linked.

With regard to the organism, as understood not just as a concept, but as a
real ontological entity, the mutual functional relationships of the organism
are semiotic.[10] For now, let us stick to single-celled organisms
and look at a part of the cell, such as an enzyme. It has a function of
catalyzing a chemical process, let us say, between two other molecules (there
can be many other enzymatic functions, such as breaking down molecules into
smaller parts, but that is secondary here). Of interest here is not the enzyme
as chemistry (for example, its structural formula seen in isolation or its
three-dimensional structure seen in isolation), but the circumstance that
when the enzyme is found in a cell with such and such other molecules,
then it "acts" in such and such a way, i.e., it reacts with these
molecules, thereby acquiring meaning to the cell (in this case: to reduce the
activation energy required to establish a bond, for example, between two other
molecules that are substrates for the active site on the enzyme, thereby
increasing the rate of the process).[11] In
other words, using the enzyme cytochrome c as an example, the function
of this enzyme is the same as the cell's "structural attribution of biological
meaning" to the cytochrome c molecule.

What does this have to do with meaning, one might ask? After all, it is we who
can see that it has meaning (functionality) to the cell. Certainly the cell
itself cannot understand that? Correct, but we will avoid the nominalistic
temptation of seeing signs only as something that can be of a mental nature
(signs in human language or understanding). Although the cell does not realize,
perceive, or understand anything, the cell is still a semiotic system in the
sense that it is a system of meaning with its own autonomous self-catalysing,
self-organising dynamic -- a dynamic, as mentioned above, that is so complex as
to presuppose genetic memory as a sign system. But the important thing here is
not so much the latter digital and relatively stable DNA code found in the
cell's nucleus in eukaryotic organisms, as it is the sign processes of a far
more general kind: Saying that cytochrome c means something to the cell
is the same as saying that it has a function. It is not just any molecule. We
could very well synthesize small proteins and artificially introduce them into
the cell. They would be without importance or they would be dysfunctional or,
with certain fortuitous strokes of luck, they would actually fulfil some
function in the cell.

To say that cytochrome c or any other molecule fulfils a function for
the cell as an organism (or for multicellular organisms: an organ, or an organ
part that fulfils a function) is the same as saying that the part operates
appropriately in the whole (an idea entertained by Kant). It is the whole, with
its special emergent structure, that establishes the framework for this
appropriateness and even though the basic laws of nature are still in effect
("effective", or "brute causation"), it is the cell as a complex system that
manages or shapes the manner in which the natural laws operate on the
individual parts: the whole operates as a constraint, as a limiting condition
from the macro level down to the micro level, from the whole to the part.

The protein cytochrome c is specific and the biological specificity is
precisely the difference cytochrome c makes to the cell. After all, if
cytochrome c had not had precisely this particular form (at least in its
active sites), it would not bring about the reaction between the components
with which it interacts. It would be dysfunctional (as it can become if the
gene for cytochrome c mutates, which can be fatal to the cell).[12]Cytochrome c mediates precisely this
reaction and not all kinds of other ones -- therein lies its meaning. This
"meaning", in the semiotic sense, of the individual enzyme is structural,
understood in such a way that the cell's molecules form a system of
dissimilarities (like the elements of language in Saussure[13]), but these dissimilarities are not of a mental or
immaterial kind. The material elements of the system have a certain
agency[14] of their own, or a local
semiotic capacity to act, if you will, and consequently the cell's molecular
system of signs is self-organizing and self-interpreting, i.e., these signs are
characterized better by the Peircean concept of sign as sign action than by the
Saussurean concept of sign as an abstract system of differences. To a great
extent, the cell is an interpretation system that is controlled by what Peirce
called "final causation", the type of causation in nature that has to do with
organization, habit formation, memory phenomena, information, appropriateness
and purposefulness, evolution -- all phenomena of the category of Thirdness
(Santaella Braga 1999).[15]

But epistemologically, too, there are close mutual conceptual conditional
relations between sign and function, at least within the framework of a
Peirce-inspired biosemiotics: The assertion here is that it is simply
impossible to understand the concept of sign, without a concept of function (of
some kind or another). And, as just indicated, the inverse is also true: It is
not possible to understand the concept of function in biology in general
without a good understanding of what an organism is and such an understanding
presupposes a concept of information, whether it be in the slightly superficial
molecular biology version as (DNA-) sequence information or in a more
thoroughly thought-out Peircean version, where information is sign. As
Bateson (1972) said, "information is a difference that makes a difference" ("to
an organism" implied) and this is 'straight Peirce', even though he probably
would have stated it in a more complex, but more precise, form such as "sign
(representamen) is a difference that makes a difference (interpretant) by
making the latter stand in relation to something else, namely that to which the
sign refers (object)". We might add: "Function is the difference that the
presence of a part of the organism makes with respect to other parts and to the
whole".

The part refers to the whole and can be understood (functionally) only within
this whole. That is an old mereological insight. When we recognize
cytochrome c as a part of the organism, we are not just interested in a
recognition of this protein as a part, similar to the recognition that a stone
is part of a gravel heap or that 1/7 is a part of the rational numbers. It is
not the abstract part-whole relationship in itself or a physical version of
such a relationship that is crucial here. The crux of the matter here is that
the relationship between the parts of an organism and the whole organism is a
mereological relationship of a particular specific nature: It is also an
"intrinsic semiotic relationship", that is, it is in its very nature semiotic.
And, it should be noted, its semiotic character is not merely something
attributed to it, just as our consciousness is not just due to the fact that
other people attribute consciousness to me, but I am actually conscious and it
is part of the concept's sine qua non that being conscious is not
derived from anything else.[16] Apart from
this formal similarity, the intrinsic semiotics of the cell has nothing to do
with consciousness in the human sense.

We now realize that there must be an internal relationship between sign and
function, that is to say when the two concepts are used in conjunction with
organisms and with what are essential features of organisms.[17] We have also more than hinted at what is meant by
internal relationship, but let us express it a bit more formally. In the
philosophical usage of the term, if something, let us call it S, is
internally related to something else, let us say F, then there is
an essential property (a sine qua non) of S whereby S is
actually linked to F by this relationship, symbolized here by
-R-. Thus, S simply would not be S, if it were not related
to F in this manner, i.e. if S-R-F were not valid. Specifically,
it would mean that a sign would not be a sign (in the biosemiotic sense) if it
were not a sign with a function, which normally means "with a function for the
organism". The traditional biologist could accept this part of the argument,
since it is hardly surprising that a process involving information, signals, or
signs in an organism must serve the best interests of the organism, i.e. it
must be functional for the organism.

At the same time, however, we would maintain that the relationship is
symmetrical, i.e. if S-R-F is valid then so is F-R-S, or in plain
language, if sign is internally related to function, then function is also
internally related to sign. A thing would simply not be a function (for the
organism) if it did not have the nature of a sign. Stated in this way, the
assertion does not appear to be immediately obvious to the traditional
biological viewpoint, since it is easy to imagine certain functional parts of
an organism, without their obviously being signs and, as mentioned, biologists
do not normally use semiotics as a conceptual tool. What does it mean, for
example, to say that the liver of a vertebrate animal is a sign? -- "Of what?"
one might sceptically ask. And what have we gained by such an assertion?

Or, with an example from the single-celled level: The Golgi apparatus in
eukaryotic cells, as seen under the electron microscope, looks like a stack of
flat bladders (membranes) stacked one on top of the other. There are still some
dark sides regarding the function of this structure, but a picture has
developed[18] of a membrane structure that is
linked to the rest of the cell's transport system, a kind of halfway house
between the endoplasmic reticulum, where proteins are synthesized, and the
secretory vesicles, which (in the periphery of the cytoplasm, at the outer
membrane of the cell) take proteins out of the cell by means of exocytosis
(membrane fusion). In addition to being part of the transport system, the Golgi
apparatus performs a biochemical modification of the proteins that are on their
way out into the surroundings (for example, "ripening" of glycoproteins by
removing certain oligosaccharides and adding others). Thus, the Golgi apparatus
clearly has functions for the cell, but why would this make it a sign?

Here, the biosemiotician must either sacrifice the idea of the internal
relationship, in its strong, symmetric form, which means that not all
biofunctions are or can be interpreted by us as being real signs, or the
biosemioticean can hold onto the symmetry; protest that we should not use an
all-too narrow concept of sign, and instead interpret the relationship as
follows: If a relationship is merely dyadic, or merely comprised of dyadic
relationships, as indicated by the notation F-R-S then, to be sure, the
relationship need not have the nature of a sign. But if F and S
do not stand for just anything, but for function and sign, and if, in
conjunction with organisms, function is already a mereologic relationship, then
F-R-S will not formally be a dyadic, but rather a triadic quantity: Any
biofunction is something (a process or a structure) that has meaning for the
organism as an interpretant system (what theoretical biologist Stanley N.
Salthe and others call a "system of interpretance"[19]), and in this broad meaning of the statement F-R-S
any functional process or structure in a cell is "biologically meaningful", in
that it makes a difference to the cell as a whole, as a system, that would be
affected immediately (often in a rather fatal direction) if the process were
blocked or the structure destroyed. Thus, the Golgi apparatus and everything at
all we can understand in a biofunctional sense has the nature of a sign, where
"sign" need not be a communicative sign in the normal sense, but may instead be
purposeful processes, with the special causal structure these processes have.

But even if biofunctions may be said to have the nature of signs, is it not
crazy to claim that the Golgi apparatus is a sign that (according to the
classical definition of sign) "stands for" something else? Yes and no. This
"stands for" relationship is obviously not a symbolic or conventional
relationship, but as we know there are also sign process forms other than the
symbolic. As mentioned, the Golgi apparatus (if it is to be understood at all
biologically and not just described physically and chemically) refers to other
structures in the cell and here it is the assertion of biosemiotics that this
reference relationship is triadic. The shape of the Golgi apparatus and the
processes that occur in it are not of importance to the endoplasmic reticulum
and the exocytotic vesicles alone. They are important to the cell as a whole.
The mereological relationship is not just formal, but also causal, namely a
case of what in some contexts is called "downward causation".[20] It is the whole that "assigns" meaning to the parts. Just
as a protein is an enzyme only when it works within a meaningful whole, the
same is true of the Golgi apparatus. Seen in itself, as a "pure" spatial
structure, it could just as well have been an accidental pattern in nature or a
bizarre sculpture on the nanoscale (nanoart!). But it is the organization of
the cell as such that co-defines the boundary conditions under which the Golgi
apparatus operates. It is part of the cell's quasi-cognitive scheme of protein
synthesis and transport. It may have a diagrammatic character (which must be
the subject of a more detailed semiotic analysis at a later time).

Such a biosemiotic understanding of the concept of function can also include
cases in which the function is not yet known: The sequences of DNA (genes) that
code for proteins or RNA molecules are easily seen as having the nature of
signs, but what about the non-coding parts, such as the repetitive sequences
(whose function is not known) or other parts of the so-called junk DNA which,
as we know, forms the bulk of our genome? In this case, the function is not
known and one might believe that the assertion concerning the internal
relationship between function and sign applies only to those parts of the
organism or cell where the function is known. However, the sequences mentioned
above can be seen as instances, sinsigns,[21]
of the same type, legisign, i.e. they are sequences of the same pieces of
non-coding DNA found in the previous generation. The way in which DNA is copied
(template replication) assures the preservation of the sequence information
and, thus, a simple sinsign/legisign relationship (just as a cookie cutter as a
general type imparts its shape on each individual cookie instance). This is
important to the relationship of general interest that organisms are internally
related to one another through bonds of kinship. For example, I am related to
my parents, since I would not be me if I did not have precisely those parents.
A person who was apparently identical to me but had other parents would not
really be me.[22]

But does everything in the cell have the nature of a sign? This may seem a bit
hard to swallow for traditional thinking but to the extent that we can, first
of all, stick to the biosemiotics of living organisms and not discuss the
possibilities of sign processes in physical nature -- physicosemiosis[23] -- and, secondly, identify in organisms the
triadic relationships and interpret them as instances of the abstract semiotic
relationships and processes, which Peircean semiotics conceptualises, the
answer must be "yes".

*

One clever person has said that the chicken is simply the egg's way of
creating a new egg and there has been no shortage of sociobiological
elucidations of this bit of wisdom. The egg as the active and acting, that
which uses something else as a functional tool. Or the egg as the original, as
in the elucidation of stolid evolutionary biology we saw earlier.[24] But any child knows that chickens and eggs
belong together, in the same temporally continuing process, whose detailed
embryological sign functions molecular biologists are still working to map out.

Life itself arises from the physical, but it cannot be fully explained by the
physical from which it has arisen. The ancient Phoenicians, Egyptians, Hindus,
Japanese, and others believed the world was egg-shaped and that the world as we
know it was hatched from an egg laid by the creator.[25] In some myths, including one attributed to Orpheus, a
bird is seen as the one that lays the mundane egg in the primordial sea. If we
assume that Orpheus actually existed, then as a poet he certainly refrained
from asking whether that bird itself had hatched from some egg. Modern science,
too, refrains from asking certain questions. But perhaps we cannot completely
let go of the Orphean egg. When it comes to fundamental problems in modern
biology and natural science as well as in general semiotics, there are always
some things that simply have to be assumed and that refer to one another.
Organisms are always pivotal. The Orphean egg is laid by a bird -- it makes a
splash, and slowly the dust begins to lift a bit.[26]

Notes

[1] The news in 2001 that the human genome has
now been charted should be taken with a grain of salt, since the picture is
hardly complete. Rather, there is a complete collection of sketches, although
they are highly detailed. For the technical details, see Nature 409:
745-964 (15 February 2001), a large issue devoted to this topic including,
among other things, the preliminary collection of sketches.

[2] Jesper Hoffmeyer's 1996 book (which was
discussed in detail in the journal Semiotica 120(3/4) (1998), and is a
good introduction to biosemiotics) asks this question most clearly. A Danish
introduction focusing on the status of scientific theory in biosemiotics is
Emmeche 1997. K. Kull (1999) provides a historical overview of the more recent
ideological history of biosemiotics.

[3] This includes, for example, John Maynard
Smith, who has made significant contributions to evolutionary theory. See, for
example, Maynard Smith (1986, 1999a, 1999b). The 1999a article attempts to
"explain" information functionally. This is not the place to discuss why the
classical attempts to reduce functional descriptions in biology have failed. An
introduction to the discussion can be found in Schaffner (1993). Maynard
Smith's 1999b article contains a rather lengthy analysis and subsequent
discussion that would lend itself well to semiotic treatment.

[4] I have programmatically described (as a
philosophical position) this semiotic realism, which such an
interpretation expresses, as the opposite of what today would be called a more
social-constructivist interpretation (Emmeche 1988, 1990).

[5] A classical text on the concept of function
that is close to the standard understanding among biologists was written by the
evolutionary biologist F. Ayala (1970).

[6] Most often, as here, "purely causal"
questions are considered to deal with the kind of causal context that is most
closely related to "effective causality" as Aristotle understood it, for
example when the cause of the collapse of a wall is said to be the energy from
the steel ball suspended from the crane. The fact that there is also an
ultimate or purposeful cause -- namely that the wall is to be removed to make
room for something else -- is typically considered secondary.

[7] A recent survey of the debate is presented
by the editors of the 1998 anthology in which Ayala 1970 is reprinted.

[8] "As a biologist", i.e. by virtue of
biological knowledge and competence. Obviously, chemists are not excluded from
biology or from speaking of functions in a biological sense when they describe
the function of an enzyme in a metabolic pathway ("reaction step"), but when
they do so, they are doing it on the basis of biological concepts and in the
capacity of biologists. Against this argument (concerning the difference
between a chemical and a biological description of a molecule) one might object
that in practical research, for example in molecular biology and its
biotechnological applications, there is no sharp distinction between when a one
is a chemist and when one is a biologist. This is absolutely correct, but the
fact that the methods of chemistry and biology are used together here in this
interdisciplinary field does not mean that the meaning of any biological
concept can be derived, so to speak, from chemical theory. The fact that
chemistry and biology have gone a relatively long way toward epistemic
integration precisely in the field of molecular biology (cf. Collin 1990), does
not necessarily mean that the chemical and the biological domains are the same,
ontologically speaking.

[9] Mereology: the study of parts and wholes,
usually refers to a mathematical or at least formal theory thereof, such as
that of Lesniewski or Goodman; developed by the former in the hope of forming
an alternative to set theory as a foundation for mathematics. For the
relationship between mereology and semiotics, see Stjernfelt (2000), although
he does not deal specifically with the biosemiotic aspects.

[10] One might well ask what knowledge we are actually expressing when
we claim that the relationships between x1, x2, ...
xn as parts of a system Y are "semiotic". What characterizes
the non-semiotic relationships of something if we have otherwise adopted an
almost pansemiotic Peirce-inspired perspective? However, we would be going too
far here if we took up the question of a "lower semiotic threshold" (which has
been dealt with in Nöth 2000a, 2000b, and elsewhere); it is sufficient to
state that even a Peirce-based semiotics need not be pansemiotic (and maintain
that any conceivable or real relationship in itself has the nature of a
sign). For example, purely dyadic relationships, which occur in physical
processes, have the category of "secondness" (sensu Peirce), such as
action and reaction. Such processes can be called kinesis, as opposed to
semiosis, which is of the category of thirdness: a living organism is
subject to the kinesis of the physical laws of nature, but as an organism it
can be understood only as a phenomenon of thirdness, i.e. as a semiotic
phenomenon that is dependent on active signs, "sign action", sign production,
and sign interpretation (Emmeche 1991).

[11] This "when X, then Y" form is
reminiscent of both "if ... then" in logical inference and "if ... then"
conditions expressed in connection with physical laws of motion. One might
believe, then, that there is no difference between physical laws of nature
expressed as regularities of the form "If a body is dropped above the earth it
falls to earth with a uniform acceleration" (Galileo's Law of falling bodies)
and the causality found in the functional relationship in the organism between
part and whole, if both are merely regularities that can be expressed as "if
... then" conditions. However, this empirical interpretation of natural law has
been greatly criticized, for example by a (Popper-inspired) 'propensity'
interpretation, which does not hesitate to attribute to nature forces,
capacities, dispositions, etc. See Chalmers' discussion in Chapter 14 of the
new 3rd edition of his theory of science. What Chalmers forgets is that the
generality of these dispositions (etc.), which are attributed to the individual
particles or objects, is better understood on the basis of Peirce's ontology,
where generalities and forms (including process forms) are real properties
inherent in nature: they are "habits". (I am grateful to Peder Voetmann
Christiansen for introducing me to this aspect of Peirce's philosophy). But
even though the physical nature can generally have habits and be regularly
controlled by "final causation", it is nonetheless a rather special form of
final causation that occurs in organisms, which is related to the
history-of-symbols nature of the genetic memory in the species' lineage: DNA
acts here as a boundary condition (Polanyi 1972), life is complex because these
boundary conditions are historical (cf. Küppers 1992), and from a semiotic
standpoint we could add that such boundary conditions or "constraints" are
phenomena that have all the characteristics of being causes (Juarrero 1998).

[12] More precisely, cytochrome c functions as
one of the important electron transporters in the respiratory chain, which (by
oxidative phosphorylation) produces the main part of the energy-rich ATP, which
is so important to the cell. This is an important and general function, as a
result of which the overall structure of the cytochromes is evolutionarily
conserved across species, from bacteria to elephants.

[13] For a detailed treatment of the
relationship between Peirce and Saussure as a basis for biosemiotics, see
Emmeche, Hoffmeyer 1991.

[14] This agency or "energy" is an indication
that the material itself is active. With regard to proteins it is dictated,
among other things, by thermodynamic processes in the protein's molecular self
assembly, after the protein is synthesized as a long peptide chain and folds
itself together into what resembles a ball of yarn, for example, although it is
helped in part by other proteins, particularly the chaperones.

[15] The same volume of Semiotica
127(1/4) is a special edition on this theme, with numerous articles on
biosemiotics, including another contribution by L. Santaella Braga on Peirce
and biology, then and now.

[16] It should be mentioned that not all
philosophers agree with this: there is an important line of demarcation in
modern philosophy of mind between those who believe that consciousness is an
intrinsic property (such as Searle and Nagel) and those who more or less
behaviouristically try to explain consciousness under the designation "the
intentional stance", etc. (such as Dennett).

[17] It is not our intention here to discuss
essentialism, but the framework of evolutionary history assumed here, in
itself, places certain limitations on a "full blown" essentialism. Essentialism
in biology refers to the now abandoned idea that the properties of an organism
are of two essentially different types: the essential, which defines for
example whether the organism belongs to the species red clover or white clover,
and the accidental, which does not have quite the same nature of
reality. Darwinism disposed of essentialism, for it saw all properties as
possessing the same degree of reality, and variation was not just something
accidental and negligible, but the very material on which selection operated.

[19] Even though Salthe (1998:391) has a
broader (physicosemiotic) understanding of what can comprise a "system of
interpretance" than the biosemioticist, the term is applicable here. See also
the overview on his homepage at www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/

[21] The first of the three trichotomies in
Peirce's 10-sign classification is division according to the sign's own
character; whether it is a quality in itself (qualisign), an actual, existing
individual thing or individual event that is a sign (sinsign), or a sign of a
general type of such individual events or things (legisign). For example, the
individual "A" is a sinsign of the general type (legisign) A.

[26]Acknowledgements. The author would
like to thank Thorkild Thellefsen and Iben Sletten for for their useful
comments on a Danish version of the manuscript. Thanks also to Jesper
Hoffmeyer, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Simo Køppe for numerous discussions
over a long period of time, among other things on the concepts of function and
sign.